The Beginnings of my Freezer Cooking

I am a huge man of freezer meal cooking.  I started freezer meal cooking in a small way when I had a very small family.  It's easy to cook a full meal and then eat leftovers for a couple days when you are only cooking for two or three.  In order to spread the leftovers out over a longer period of time I'd cook the entire package of ground beef, season it for tacos, and then freeze half.  This meant the second meal could be eaten in a few weeks, not a few days. As my family grew, I moved away from this because I was able to use the entire contents for one meal.

Over time I joined a freezer meal group.  There were a group of eight with families of comparable sizes.  We each cooked or prepared eight of the same meal, met together once a month to swap the meals, and we walked away with eight different meals for the month.  We had guidelines everyone agreed to and it worked great.  Each month you knew eight of your meals were ready to go.  You could plan them for two of your busy nights each week, or eat them all at once. This type of freezer cooking can be varied depending on the size of your group, the size of your freezers, and your individual needs.

In time we moved away from our freezer meal group and missed the convenience of being able to have those meals available when I needed them.  I missed the variety of the food coming into our home, and having days where I didn't have to think about what to cook.  In our new home our kids were coming home from school later, homework was a little more time consuming, and I realized I needed to do something to help the menu planning.  With no freezer meal group, we decided to try out making our own freezer meal rotation.  We had a friend years ago who had been doing this, and I felt inspired and motivated to make it my own.

Unfortunately, moving also meant we left our second fridge/freezer in the garage at our old home.  So, now I had all the ambition in the world to cook for a month, but only had the freezer in my kitchen to work with.  This created some challenges that we've worked through and I am here to tell you it can be done.  A variety of tasty food from the freezer in your kitchen.

Now, does this mean you won't have to cook at all? Probably not.  There are certain things that require, or are much better cooked the same day.

Does this mean you have to eat the same foods over and over again?  That depends on you and how much variety you want in your menu.  I have found with my family we typically were eating the same foods, or types of foods, over and over anyway.

Are there foods you shouldn't freeze?  Yes, any food with a high water content will not freeze well uncooked.  This doesn't mean you can't freeze these foods, it just means you have to be a little creative.  Science is on your side, and you may have to learn a little about science and freezing in the process.  Relax, no homework and no term papers in these science lessons, just a little experimenting.

So, how do you start?  Read on...